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New feathered dinosaur discovered

EDMONTON—It had feathers and looked as if it were part-penguin, part-duck, and part-swan.

It was between the size of a chicken and a turkey, and ate the same sorts of things in the same sorts of places as a heron.

But it was a dinosaur.

“This is kind of a bizarre one," said University of Alberta paleontologist Philip Currie, who introduced his new feathered friend in the journal "Nature.”

Halszkaraptor escuilliei (let's call it Halzie) is a member of the same dinosaur family as the famous raptors from “Jurassic Park,” but it wouldn't have been chasing any human-sized prey through the wetlands and swamps of the late Cretaceous era.

“This guy is a lot smaller and a lot more bird-like,” noted Currie.

But it's Halzie's anatomy, not its movie possibilities, that make it so interesting.

Like all members of the dinosaur raptor family, Halzie stood upright on its hind legs with a foot featuring a long, elevated claw, but leaned forward like a short-tailed bird.

Its neck was huge—about half of its total length.

“It would be a perfect neck for an animal that was wading in the water and, if something went by, it would strike with its sharp little beak,” Currie said.

Halzie's short little arms seemed to be adapted to swimming, with flat, thin-walled bones and hands with an elongated outside finger—much like those seen in the feet of other aquatic dinosaurs.